Protei

Protei is developed primarily to collect oil spills under Open Hardware licensing by Open_Sailing, randomwalks, V2_ and Amorphica. Everyone is welcome to join, contribute, modify, produce, distribute the design and share their findings. V2_ is an official partner, till the summer of 2011 the team is working in collaboration with V2_lab on the realization of the first working prototype.

Protei is part of the Open Sailing project and is initiated by Cesar Harada. The first part of the project is financed through crowd funding on Kickstarter.com

VisionProtei as a fleet of pollution collecting sailing drones, is using
existing technologies in an innovative design we can implement on the
short term to address the crisis. We are developing a low-cost
open-source oil collecting device that semi-autonomously sails upwind,
intercepting oil sheens going downwind. The design of protei is meant to
be hurricane-ready, self-righting, inflatable, unbreakable, cheap and
easy to manufacture for immediate response. The machine we are
developing now is Protei_Oil_Spill for collecting spilled oil at sea,
but being an open source project, other versions may be designed in the
future for other purposes : Protei for the North Pacific Plastic garbage
patch, heavy metals in coastal areas, toxic substances in urbanized
waterways...

Current oil spill skimming technology could only collect 3% of the DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill
in the Gulf of Mexico. The health of workers was exposed to cancerous
toxic, the boats were expensive and pollutive to operate, they could not
operate in bad weather (hurricane seaon) they could not operate at
night or far away.

Protei is a technology currently in development that will provide
-
Unmanned, no human exposed to toxic.
- Green and cheap, sailing upwind capturing oil downwind.
- Self-righting, rugged, can operate in hurricane time.
- Semi-autonomous : can swarm continuously and far away.

The word protei comes from Proteus Anguinus
which is the scientific name of an Olm, a very long white salamander
living in complete darkness, blind but with an acutely developed sense
of smell and hearing. Protei is the plural for Proteus, the greek god son and herdsman of Poseidon
the god of the sea. God Proteus was known for his "capability of
assuming many forms", "mutable". "Protean" has positive connotations of
flexibility, versatility and adaptability.

This summer, V2_ hosted an international team of designers and engineers on the development of Protei_006, the first full-scale version of the autonomous sailing robot that will clean oil spills in the oceans. The exhibition as part of Festival ...

V2_ and the Protei team invite you to come to the press preview and presentation of Protei, an autonomous sailing robot for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean, during the Wereldhavendagen on September 2nd, 2011 in the port of Rotterdam.

In preparation for his residency, Cesar Harada visited V2_Lab last week. Together with Etienne Gernez and Henrik Rudstrøm, he built this test model for Protei, in which the basic principles of an inflatable, articulated hull were tested. ...